Robert Marcano's blog

Addicted to Mercurial SCM

robert — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:19:09 -0300

While I was learning how to use Mercurial in order to contribute to the Mozilla platform, I became addicted to it, and with the migration tools now I have access to my repositories with full history on the go, without need of permanent connection to the CVS or SVN server. I can even do offline commits to my local copies.

I had not found a nice GUI for it yet, but being restricted to the command line is not a big reason to not use the powerful offline features. ummmm OpenJDK is stored on Mercurial, and Netbeans 6.1 finall will have support for it.

Everyone against Red Hat

robert — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:33:20 -0400

The later announcement of the Novell/Microsoft partnership is another example of the attacks that Red Hat is facing, the previous one was from Oracle.

Red Hat is the current leader in the commercial Linux server market, and Novell is a very distant second. This is just Novell trying to join forces to attack a common enemy. I never trusted them as a real Open Source business, they only bought Suse because their proprietary OS was dying, in order to be able to continue selling their other proprietary offerings. In contrast Red Hat buys closed source applications and make all the changes needed to open source them, for example Fedora/Red Hat Directory Server based on its powerful predecessor, Netscape Directory Server; meanwhile Novell do not open source their core business. Novell buys Ximian for their .Net clone Mono, a dangerous proposition because MS will always be there as the only director of .Net future; Red Hat instead invest in a free Java implementation (GCJ/GNU Classpath). I hadn't bought any Linux product from Novell, and now it seems more improbable.

Finally I don't want to forget to talk about the crazy Oracle idea, do they really think that I will pay for support for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone to someone that has no expertize on OS development, that will give me security updates after Red Hat has done the job (with a delay), and that is not able to implement a decent JEE application server and that their support service recommends temporal hacks and do not solve the real issues on the application server... Yes Suuuuuure.

Update: Red Hat responds

Openly defined standards create interoperability everyone can implement. That's the real solution. It doesn't require a deal between two companies.

Dirvish on Fedora Extras

robert — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:02:28 -0300

Dirvish package has been approved and is now part of Fedora Extras.

Welcome bad coders

robert — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:06:47 -0300

Soon, the Mono runtime will have a Portability Layer or what I call the Welcome Bad Coders Layer. This is not the correct way to do things, fix the application if you have those problems and do not hack the runtime to allow bad coding practices. What will we see next?, a new patch to the Linux kernel to fix bad implemented applications? like Microsoft has done:

"I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it"

Taken from joelonsoftware.com

I hope that repositories like Fedora Extras will not allow the usage of this ugly hack.

dirvish submitted to Fedora Extras

robert — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:22:33 -0300

Now is the Dirvish turn to be packaged. Dirvish is a relly easy to use tool to create disk based rotating network backups.

perl-Time-Period submitted to Fedora Extras

robert — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:48:58 -0300

I submitted for review the perl-Time-Period package to Fedora Extras, it is a small Perl module used by Dirvish, that I want to submit too.

Update: Accepted and added to the extras repository

NetworkManager-openvpn

robert — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:14:30 -0300

The NetworkManager OpenVPN plugin is really good, that means no more configuration file editing and no more sudo.

RubyGems packager

robert — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:20:19 -0300

I am begining to experiment with Ruby on Rails, until now I found the first thing I dislike about it, the RubyGems packaging system. I do not want to use another packaging system different that the one provided by the OS, be it RPM or Debian packages, or any other option; I do not want to have files on the /usr filesystem that are not managed by the OS packager tool, I want to be sure that running the OS update tool is enough to have my system up-to-date (yum update). So the only solution I have is to build RPM packages for the ruby libraries I need and submit them to Fedora Extras.

Temporally I have created the ruby-gems RPM package, and I am using the environment variables GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to install ruby packages on my home directory.

I found a Debian Extras position document about RubyGems, and I agree with that position.

Subclipse added to Fedora Extras

robert — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:14:26 -0300

After approval I added Subclipse (Subversion Eclipse plugin) to the Fedora Extras repository. The news reached Fedora People and Planet GCC.

Japanese and LaTeX

robert — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 14:15:07 -0300

I learned how to install support for Asian languages to LaTeX using the CJK Extensions and adding the required fonts. Something like this:

\documentclass{article}
\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}
\setlength{\pdfpageheight}{11in}
\usepackage{CJK}
\usepackage{ruby}
\renewcommand{\rubysep}{-0.1ex}
\usepackage[spanish,english]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\newcommand{\jap}[1]{\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{sazanami-mincho}#1\end{CJK}}

\begin{document}
A very simple document made with \LaTeX\ including Japanese text with \emph{furigana}:
\jap{\ruby{日本語}{にほんご}の\ruby{学生}{がくせい}}

\end{document}

is converted to a nice PDF.